January 26 - March 2, 2007Circular ReasoningCurated by Dennis Scholl (Miami Beach, FL)Featured Miami artists: Natalia Benedetti, Jason Hedges, Tao Rey, Michael VasquezCircular Reasoning brings together a number of young artists from Miami, Florida, that have come up through the vibrant Miami art scene at approximately the same time. Each of their work shows conceptual rigor and focuses on the life affirming. In each case, the works cause the viewer to stop and take a second reading, to circle around and digest the message, to reason out the back-story to each piece. Circular Reasoning can take the viewer only so far. The rest will come from a studious relationship with the works, their sleight of hand, their effort to compel the viewer to return over and over again.

Paper is the mischievous fairy of the art world—no longer the ground for serious work but the work itself. Liberated by computer correspondence and digital publishing, artists are treating it as a useful shape-shifter. Its wide-open field of sculptural possibility emulates photography’s liberation of painting as the court reporter of history. Paperwork brings together four national artists who take the drudgery out of our standard concept of paperwork (artist grants, job applications, and taxes) and treat it with warmth and ingenuity.

Potentialities draws on a range of materials and experiences constitutive of “everyday” reality, from common utilitarian objects to our standard method of time-keeping. The subtle alteration of such materials and experiences can then bring into being something which seems to the viewer both familiar and foreign. In the anxiety unique to such arresting moments, we are called to wonder what new paths we are now free to take up.

July 14, 2007The Final Run Ins: Zypherine Cousteau's Underwater Malta DiscotekKnown for disturbing conservative bird brained ninnies worldwide and for their peculiar stage sets, The Final Run Ins are an irregular hardcore band comprised of three mischievous malcontents (Ben Brantley, Nathan Carter, Matthew Ronay) searching for that highly elusive element of fun in an increasingly unfun art world.

July 27 - September 4, 2008The Yellow WallpaperCurated by Risa Puleo (Austin, TX)Featured artists: Karen Mahaffy (San Antonio, TX) and Erin Curtis (Austin, TX)The Yellow Wallpaper takes its name and inspiration from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1899 short story, in which the main character, based on Gilman’s own experience, is driven into a state of temporary insanity by the patterns papering the wall of the room she is confined to after being prescribed a Victorian “rest cure.” And though it is not the artists’ intention to induce or invoke madness through their exploration of pattern, others of the story’s motifs reverberate in the work they present. Aspects of space including the domestic, and by association, the feminine; the psychological, and thus an interior and internal space; and the physical, as a counterpoint to the self, all manifest in the exhibition. Ultimately, the exhibition provide an opportunity to consider Unit B’s setting in a house, and the ways in which we live in, interact with and understand this universal construct.

September 21 - November 2, 2007Real AppropriateAdam Blumberg (Philadelphia, PA)Chuck Ramirez (San Antonio, TX)Real Appropriate is an exhibition of photographic works that celebrate the simplicity of people, places, and things while exploring the human condition. Blumberg’s photographs embrace glaring stereotypes of blue collar Midwesterners in a sincere attempt to pay tribute to his lower middle class upbringing, while Ramirez’ large-scale portraits of banal objects are humorous, yet poignant metaphors for the transient nature of consumer culture and the frailty of life.

Turn your art history books to early landscape painting and you’ll see depictions of mountains, valleys, trees, rivers and forests generally formed around concepts of untouched nature. A place where the viewer could mentally insert themselves into the picture—a place for human activity. Stepping ahead to the 21st century, landscape as we know it might include the dense mesh of city buildings, cleared tracts of land, construction of suburban neighborhoods, and threatened wilderness. Landscapes vs. Netscapes addresses the illusion of landscape under the influence of a manufactured environment. The work in the exhibition focuses on the future of nature and the detachment of the human experience.